Scientific Data Management Group Projects

Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) ProgramClimate Research Facility (ACRF), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy is a scientific user facility for the study of global climate change by the national and international research community. The program operates a highly diverse set of fixed and mobile facilities to measure clouds, aerosols, radiation, and the interactions among them. The PNNL SDM team has operational responsibilities for monitoring, administrating, and maintaining the ACRF Data Management Facility (DMF) infrastructure, which serves as a hub for the development and processing of atmospheric measurement data streams from ARM's numerous, geographically distributed, highly heterogeneous instruments. Technical contributions include the development of instrument and data processing monitoring tools, modules to collect, process, and add additional scientific value to the raw data, and the development of the libraries, databases, and other supporting infrastructure tools needed to ensure the continuous flow of high-quality data products through the DMF to the atmospheric science user community.

Integrated Regional Earth Systems Modeling (iRESM) PNNL is developing a modeling framework, to address regional human-environmental system interactions in response to climate change and the uncertainties therein. The framework will consist of a suite of integrated models representing regional climate change, regional climate policy, and the regional economy, with a focus on simulating the mitigation and adaptation decisions made over time in the energy, transportation, agriculture, and natural resource management sectors. The framework currently contains 10 complementary models working at different scales and levels of theory and discipline, each contributing to the complex scenario analysis. The scientific data management group is building a collaborative environment supporting the model development, evaluation and scenario analysis, helping to address and overcome the semantic differences between the different science domains during model coupling, result analysis and representation.

Climate Science for a Sustainable Energy Future (CSSEF) the U.S. Department of Energy's funded collaboration with LLNL, ORNL, ANL, LBNL and LANL will focus on the reduction of uncertainty within climate models. The project will develop a sophisticated testbed for model validation and uncertainty quantification within the framework of the Earth Systems Grid. Using an extended set of observational data to address global atmospheric, oceanic and land modeling. The PNNL scientific data management group is involved in the atmospheric data preparation and assessment, as well as the testbed infrastructure development.

Chemical Imaging Initiative (CII)This PNNL initiative will deliver a suite of unique tools with nanometer scale resolution and element specificity that will allow researchers to go from model system observation to real-world manipulation on a molecular level. It is building signature, in situ capabilities in: Light source based x-ray and vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) probes coupled with laboratory based imaging capabilities for 3D tomographic, structural, and element specific interrogation at the molecular level and coupled optical, electron, ion, mass, and scanned-probe microscopies to understand chemical and biological transformations and mechanisms. The PNNL scientific data management group is leading the development of a new multi-modal integrative software framework to address the real time analysis and co-analysis requirements of the initiative for image reconstruction, feature extraction and information integration.

The Future Power Grid Initiative (FPGI) at PNNL is looking at the power grid as it will exist 20+ years from now with smart meters at every house, intelligent appliances, increased renewable energy sources, and significantly more sophisticated sensors monitoring everything. Within the SDM group, we are looking at providing power engineers the ability to quickly search 100+TB data stores based on semantically meaningful descriptions of complex events (e.g., load shedding, islanding), instead of looking solely at the raw data streams. We are taking a multi-step approach, which uses statistical analysis to identify spatio-temporal events within the raw data, manual conversion of those event descriptions into rules capable of automatically identifying events within the data stream, storage of these events in a metadata catalog, and efficient access to the catalog through a custom API. In collaboration with other FPGI efforts, this capability will ultimately enable more effective interaction with the data and lead to a more stable and efficient grid infrastructure.

BELLE II - High Energy Physics PNNL is the US lead partner in the international BELLE II high energy physics experiment, the ‘B-Factory' is based at KEK in Japan and follows on from the very successful BELLE collaboration, which operated from 1999 to 2010. The upgraded experiment is expected to exceed the data rates of the LHCb (Event Rate (Hz)3x LHCb, Event size 12x LHCb, Data Rate 36x LHCb). The scientific data management group is part of the international team developing a new distributed data management and analysis infrastructure for the BELLE experiment, focusing particularly on the fast access to specific event data and their fast analysis. Following the recent earthquake PNNL assist KEK in the provision of the data and computing capacity for the current international BELLE data analysis effort. In addition, the scientific data management group is representing PNNL and BELLE in the ICFA study group forData Preservation and Long Term Analysis in High Energy Physics (DPHEP).

W3C Provenance Working Group Eric Stephan is an active member of the W3C provenance working group, which is developing standard formats to identify and sufficiently describe the methods used to create documents, data and resources shared on the web.